Darwin Among the Machines (42 page)

The hand grenade was viewed as an archaic, unsporting weapon, of dubious utility on the modern battlefield now that rifles and machine guns could kill precisely at distances far greater than the range of a grenade. But a season or two of trench warfare was about to change all that. Dyson was in the right place at the right time. “A weapon has had to be evolved that shall have as much destructive force as possible, combined with such a high angle of descent as will render the mere depth of a trench no efficient protection,” he wrote in 1917.
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Unable to locate either experts or grenades, Dyson became an expert and designed his own reusable practice grenades, heavy iron castings loaded with just the right amount of gunpowder and clay. As the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, he knew how to approach local suppliers without letting formalities get in the way. He constructed a training ground complete with fire trenches, traverses, listening posts, and machine-gun emplacements and set about developing the talents of his soldiers with all the enthusiasm he had devoted to his best music students before the war.

“A very high standard of accuracy is required,” he wrote in 1915. “The difficulties are greatly augmented when, as is usually the case, throwing has to be done under complete cover, and according to directions given verbally by an observer. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of throwing practice of every kind. . . . Nothing can excuse inaccurate throwing, and instructors must not be satisfied until the thrower can, from behind cover, and in obedience to the command of an observer, throw missiles of varying weight and size into a specified trench at any reasonable distance or in any direction.”
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Dyson had been born with perfect pitch for music; he now did his best to cultivate perfect pitch in the throwing of grenades. Timing was everything. Although trenches were stationary targets, the unforgiving nature of a four-second fuse added some of the temporal challenges faced by a hunter throwing a projectile at moving prey. “When using live bombs the thrower will hold the bomb in his hand with the arm extended. The carrier who will always be with him, will light the fuze and as soon as it is lit will tap the thrower's arm as a signal that
the bomb is ready to throw, and the thrower will time his throw so that the bomb falls into the objective just before it explodes.”
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Dyson held competitions between teams of grenadiers, organized like cricket matches but producing a lot more noise. “Instructors must take the greatest care to ensure that familiarity with explosives does not lead to carelessness in handling them,” he warned. “Grenadiers must be constantly reminded of the great danger in swinging percussion grenades. A hit or graze on some part of the trench may easily be fatal to the thrower. No preliminary swinging will be allowed.”
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To throw accurately without a windup was like performing a difficult piece of music without a rehearsal.

Dyson's methods attracted the attention of his superiors and were duplicated far and wide. His notes were issued in 1915 as a small pamphlet,
Grenade Warfare: Notes on the Training and Organization of Grenadiers
, selling for sixpence and designed to be tucked into the pockets of soldiers heading to the front. An expanded edition, costing fifty cents, was published in New York in 1917. As usual in military training manuals, only passing mention is given to what happens after the bombs explode. An appended section on bayonet fighting notes that “when the thrower has thrown his bomb into the objective trench, the bayonet men must be ready to take instant advantage of the temporary demoralization of the enemy caused by the explosion and clear the way for a similar attack on the next section of trench.”
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Royalties accumulated a fraction of a sixpence at a time. Dyson survived a tour of duty on the front lines in France, returning shell-shocked but otherwise unscathed. By the time of the armistice in November 1918 an entire generation had been maimed by a war in which, as Garet Garrett put it, “God was on the side of the most machines.”
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Taking the side of the foot soldier, my grandfather demonstrated that throwing things by hand still had a place in the age of airplanes and tanks. He returned to civilian life comfortably well off, raised a family, and, as director of the Royal College of Music during World War II, slept in a storeroom while leading the effort to maintain musical performances in London amid the blackout and the bombs. “Apart from the incendiary fire in the opera wing which, thanks to [Fred] Devenish and the fire-watchers, did not reach the main building, and the later blitz which smashed two hundred windows, we had no serious damage,” he reported. “But we were on the edge of destruction for months on end.”
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When he published his autobiography in 1954 he titled it
Fiddling While Rome Burns
. The creativity of music and the destruction of war are opposing expressions of the human spirit, yet my grandfather found room for both.

Dyson, who wrote, “I cannot remember the time when I could not read music and hear what I had read,” began playing the organ professionally at age thirteen and worked among the great cathedrals all his life. But “he was not particularly religious,” my father recalled. “He always said that music was as close to religion as he could get.” He knew that music transcended everyday existence, but he never understood how, or why. These abilities remain unexplained. “The number of sounds and patterns that a sensitive musical brain can hold and recall at will is beyond either computation or understanding,” Dyson wrote, citing abilities far exceeding his own. “There have been and are still conductors who by defect of sight cannot read a score while they are conducting it. Toscanini is one of these, and he comes to the rehearsal, even of a whole opera, with every detail of every part already registered in his mind.”
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Noting that it was physically impossible to play consistently in tune on early instruments, he commented that “Beethoven would never have heard, even if his own hearing had been perfect, even a tolerable performance, by our standards, of the greater works of his maturity. He, like his predecessors, wrote from his imagination. The music was created in his mind, and nowhere else.”
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My grandfather regarded the origins of music and musical abilities as an impenetrable mystery, their purpose not to be explained in terms of anything else. “Why have we these powers of intuition and expression in sound which so completely transcend the normal use of our senses, and which appear to have neither a boundary or a meaning that can be rationally defined?” he asked. “The only theory of art which makes sense is that which acknowledges the specific creation of a new world, a world differing from, and not to be explained in terms of, any other worlds, material or physical, except that of the art in question. . . . The arts continue to develop themselves, and enlarge our faculties of perception and response, in their own right and on their own terms. The saint both pursues and creates religion. The scientist both seeks and makes truth. The artist evolves his own sense of order and expresses it by his craft. These are all new worlds, living their own lives according to their own laws. We cannot explain a world created by our imagination. It may have no material counterpart in life at all.”
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The mystery of music brings us to the closing fable of this book. It is the work of Danny Hillis, architect of the massively parallel Connection Machine, and one of the closer approximations to a Doctor Mirabilis alive today. Fables survive in association with enduring questions. The question here is why the mystery of music runs even
deeper than the mystery of mind. In a 1988 essay titled “Intelligence as an Emergent Behavior; or, the Songs of Eden,” Hillis offered a parable in which, to simplify an already simplified story, music leads to the emergence of mind rather than the other way around.

“Once upon a time, about two and a half million years ago, there lived a race of apes that walked upright. In terms of intellect and habit they were similar to modern chimpanzees. The young apes, like many young apes today, had a tendency to mimic the actions of others. In particular, they had a tendency to imitate sounds. . . . Some sequences of sounds were more likely to be repeated than others. I will call these ‘songs.'

“For the moment let us ignore the evolution of the apes and consider the evolution of the songs. Since the songs were replicated by the apes, and since they sometimes died away and were occasionally combined with others, we may consider them, very loosely, a form of life. They survived, bred, competed with one another, and evolved according to their own criterion of fitness. If a song contained a particularly catchy phrase that caused it to be repeated often, then that phrase was likely to be repeated and incorporated into other songs. Only songs that had a strong tendency to be repeated survived.

“The survival of the song was only indirectly related to the survival of the apes. It was more directly affected by the survival of other songs. Since the apes were a limited resource, the songs had to compete with one another for a chance to be sung. One successful strategy for competition was for a song to specialize; that is, for it to find a particular niche where it would be likely to be repeated.

“Up to this point the songs were not of any particular value to the apes. In a biological sense they were parasites, taking advantage of the apes' tendency to imitate. Once the songs began to specialize, however, it became advantageous for an ape to pay attention to the songs of others and to differentiate between them. By listening to songs, a clever ape could gain useful information. For example, an ape could infer that another ape had found food, or that it was likely to attack. Once the apes began to take advantage of the songs, a mutually beneficial symbiosis developed. Songs enhanced their survival by conveying useful information. Apes enhanced their survival by improving their capacity to remember, replicate, and understand songs. The blind forces of evolution created a partnership between the songs and the apes that thrived on the basis of mutual self-interest. Eventually this partnership evolved into one of the world's most successful symbionts: us.”
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This explanation of how symbiosis between sequence (songs) and structure (apes) led to the evolution of mind is subject, like all good fables, to a wide range of interpretations. It can be interpreted as an explanation of how sequence (genes) and structure (metabolism) led to the development of organic life, or of how sequence (coding) and structure (computers) is leading to developments we can only begin to grasp. Computer software developed hierarchically, just as stored motor-control sequences may have led to increasing levels of abstraction in our brains. Fifty years ago the only electronic software in existence comprised a few strings of instructions occupying the storage buffers of the ENIAC, designed to calculate the launch window for firing artillery or dropping bombs. As Hillis's songs of Eden evolved from music into mind, digital coding has come of age, living its own lives according to its own laws. We have absolutely no idea what species of music or what species of mind will be the result. It is unlikely that it will be perceivable as music or as mind to us.

For a long, long time—much longer than we have been waiting for the brass head to speak—we have awaited the appearance of a higher intelligence from above or a larger intelligence from without. Arthur C. Clarke, Olaf Stapledon's distinguished successor, wrote his novel
Childhood's End
(1953) around the premise that an advanced intelligence would descend from outer space, bringing our childhood to an end. The Overlords, as they were called, absconded with the minds of our children, and humanity as we know it came to an end. We should heed this warning as we proceed to construct what amounts to an overmind. Alien beings are unlikely to bear any resemblance, mental or physical, to human beings, and it is presumptuous to assume that artificial intelligence will operate on a level, or a time scale, that we are able to comprehend. As we merge toward collective intelligence, our own language and intelligence may be relegated to a subsidiary role or left behind. When the brass head speaks, there is no guarantee that it will speak in a language that we can understand.

The evolution of languages is a central mechanism by which life and intelligence unfold. Over the past fifty years the digital universe has spawned a host of languages, the most successful being slightly better adapted not only to the workings of machines but to the human mind. Translation remains tedious and slow. Human beings are unlikely ever to speak the language of digital computers much faster than they did at the beginning, one line of code at a time. Indeed, when it comes to binary coding by human beings, it would be difficult to improve on the abilities of telegraph operators, who had a century's head start.

Languages are maps. By conveying information across distance and over time, or from one form of expression to another, languages derive the sustenance on which they feed and grow. Morse code provides a mapping between the alphabet and short, dot-dash strings; the genetic code translates between nucleotides and proteins; natural language translates between words and ideas; HyperText Markup Language (HTML) maps the topology of the Internet into strings of communicable code. Languages survive by hosting the reproduction of structures (letters, words, enzymes, ideas, books, or cultures) that in turn constitute a system sustaining the language from which they sprang. Music translates, in ways we little understand, between sequences of sounds and mental structures that have proved astonishingly successful at propagating themselves. That music does not map to any other known language does not render its meaning any less exact. “Music,” answered Mendelssohn when asked about the meaning of his
Songs Without Words
, “is not thought too
indefinite
to be put into words, but, on the contrary, too
definite
.”
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